While most consumers trust educational materials from businesses, they lose trust when that message is combined with a marketing spiel.

Content marketing can be a difficult trick to pull off. When trying to educate members of the public about a certain topic, the message can be lost when a product pitch is made. The theory is that if users find themselves unwittingly reading or watching a piece of marketing, they might lose interest. The results of a new survey from Kentico Software drill into the facts about content marketing.

The public does trust an educational message from a business; 74 percent of survey respondents agreed. However that trust can be fragile, because inserting a promotional message at the end of a post can drag down a post’s credibility by 29 percent. That’s only one mistake content marketers make; survey respondents had other complaints.

Forty-six percent of respondents were less likely to trust information that they couldn’t corroborate from non-company sources and 17 percent were skeptical when the posts didn’t include other viewpoints or perspectives. Talking down to the reader degraded trust, according to 12 percent of respondents. When the origin of the information wasn’t clear, 15 percent of respondents lost trust.

“While customers will for the most part give a company’s content marketing the benefit of the doubt, businesses must take care in not breaking that trust with information that can’t be corroborated or strays from the truth altogether. In this way, content marketing and transparent marketing must go together at all times,” Kentico CEO and founder Petr Palas said in a statement.

Discoverability was a key factor in gaining trust, according to the survey. Sixty-nine percent of respondents found the information more credible when it was shared by a friend or family member. And respondents were more than happy to share educational content with others; 94 percent of them claimed to have shared this kind of content.

In order to maximize the effectiveness of your content marketing, be sure to take user opinions into consideration. Customers and followers are a vocal crowd, and if you’re doing something wrong, they will likely inform you. It’s easy to lose the trust of customers, but once your business has it, be aware that those customers are likely to be very loyal to the company.